(Part 1. Part 2.)
Even though there is no mandate in the teaching of the Universal Church that mothers avoid work that separates them from their children, there are two strong forces in Church teaching that encourage what we in the U. S. would call "stay-at-home mothering."
—- The first is the nature of a vocation. There are two broad categories of vocation: vowed matrimony and vowed celibacy. Vowed celibacy can be expressed in a variety of vocations: to the priesthood (for men), to a contemplative order of nuns or monks, to an active order, in consecrated virginity (for women). In all of these, we are called to make a free gift of our whole selves to the service of our vocation. Why? All vocations are nuptial, like a marriage, because all of them point to the final union of the Church with Christ who is called the "Bridegroom."
I have seen some claim that there is a "vocation to the single life," but this is an error; to my knowledge all vocations call you to a vowed life. Making a free gift of your whole self to the service of your vocation requires a vow. There is no vow involved in "the single life," ergo it cannot be called a "vocation." Singleness is a period of discernment of vocation, not a vocation of itself.
(Is that fair? After all, many people remain single and unvowed through no fault of their own. True. Some people are called to marriage yet find no suitable mate, and some are called to priesthood yet cannot qualify, and some are called to religious life yet aren’t accepted to any order. I suspect this is a sad effect of original sin.)
Speaking specifically of the vocation to marriage: Giving your whole self to that vocation means that different people give different gifts, but in each case it’s all that you are. Once we are married, everything we do (after the things we do for God alone) is supposed to be, directly or indirectly, in service to the family. If we work, we work in order to serve our family. If we spend time relaxing, we do so in order to refresh ourselves to better serve our family. There is no room for mere self-fulfillment here. Certainly, there’s space to enjoy your own pursuits, but it can never be done at the expense of the family. Self-improvement must be done always with an eye to how it helps the family as a whole. This isn’t a self-immolation, incidentally. When you serve the family, that doesn’t mean "serve everyone’s interests except your own." The self is part of the family, after all, and activities that benefit the self — in its proper order within the family — serve the vocation of marriage.
This understanding of vocation prompts us to consider our balance of work in terms of what best serves the family. The primary purpose of marriage — the begetting and education of children — prompts a certain prejudice in favor of what best ensures the proper raising of the children.
Without question, children are best raised by someone who loves them, who cares about their success, who wants them to grow up to be saints, who is committed to forming their moral character. In most cases, that’s their family. Mother, father, perhaps grandparents or other extended family members; maybe godparents, or exceptionally close friends who are "like family."
Economics matter, too. Maybe, after crunching the numbers and carefully considering the day care options available to them, a parent or parents will regretfully decide that they have to resort to some kind of extrafamilial or institutional day care. But if they are committed to their vocation, to giving their whole self to the vocation, they do it because they believe it is giving all of what they have at the time; they’ll compensate for what is lacking as best they can; and they’ll strive to escape to better circumstances.
— The second area of Church teaching that impacts stay-at-home mothering is the theology of the body. You may have noticed that the above argument from vocations concludes that family should care for children. It doesn’t conclude that women should care for their children; it suggests that the dad should stay home, or the mom should stay home, or the dad and mom should take turns, or the parents should choose a loving and moral caregiver of either gender from among their closest family and friends.
The theology of the body (which is much larger than just this issue) proclaims forcefully that the differences between men and women that are written in our biology, in our bodies, are important. That men and women are not interchangeable. That we have a certain "vocation" expressed in our bodies, a vocation to manhood or to womanhood. Manhood intersects with marriage, and the intersection is different from the intersection of womanhood and marriage. Manhood intersects with celibacy, too, differently from womanhood’s intersection.
Look at women’s bodies: we are called by our design, if we have children, to nourish them when they are babies. A more studied look at the biology of motherhood and babyhood reveals that we and our babies are so closely linked by design as to be one only "organism" — not just during pregnancy, but for the first few years of life. Sure, we can snip that thread anytime we choose by forcibly weaning and forcibly separating, but that’s not the way our bodies are designed to be, and it’s a lot nicer for both mother and baby to go with nature’s flow.
(And recall always that work outside the home must still serve the vocation of marriage by supporting the family. It should not be excessive, and should allow for adequate time with the family, because fatherhood is more than just cash production, too.)
There is a presumption inherent in the vocations of womanhood and of marriage that the mother gives herself primarily to caring for her babies. Again, that’s a presumption, not a hard line. There surely are circumstances in which both parents giving their whole self to the vocation of marriage means that Dad is caring for babies and Mom is off doing something else, if not all of the time then some of the time. But it has to be done in those cases in service to the family. Dare I say, too, striving for better circumstances? "Better" being circumstances in which Mom cares for the babies? It’s kind of hard to write that! But if vocation is to mean anything, and if the body is to express our vocation, then we have to strive always to live out our vocation more and more perfectly.
That’s babies. What about older children? My children are still very young, so I don’t know from experience if the inherent mother-child biological connection remains in some form after children are grown past babyhood. It’s possible that there’s no presumption that mothers should be the ones primarily charged with older kids. I lean towards the idea that, past babyhood, children begin to be formed in their own vocations. Fathers play an enormous role in forming kids for their vocations, because they make a bridge between the family and the outside world where the vocation is to be found. This is a good reason to be terribly critical of an economic system that separates the family during the "workday." (Another reason, of course, is that it leads to this situation where women agonize about whether to "stay home or to work!")
UPDATE. The conclusion is here, in Part 4.
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